Abstract
Booster vaccination with messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines has been offered to adults in England starting on 14 September 2021. We used a test-negative case-control design to estimate the relative effectiveness of a booster dose of BNT162b2 (Pfizer-BioNTech) compared to only a two-dose primary course (at least 175 days after the second dose) or unvaccinated individuals from 13 September 2021 to 5 December 2021, when Delta variant was dominant in circulation. Outcomes were symptomatic coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and hospitalization. The relative effectiveness against symptomatic disease 14-34 days after a BNT162b2 or mRNA-1273 (Moderna) booster after a ChAdOx1-S (AstraZeneca) and BNT162b2 as a primary course ranged from around 85% to 95%. Absolute vaccine effectiveness ranged from 94% to 97% and was similar in all age groups. Limited waning was seen 10 or more weeks after the booster. Against hospitalization or death, absolute effectiveness of a BNT162b2 booster ranged from around 97% to 99% in all age groups irrespective of the primary course, with no evidence of waning up to 10 weeks. This study provides real-world evidence of substantially increased protection from the booster vaccine dose against mild and severe disease irrespective of the primary course.
A test-negative case-control analysis of data from the National Immunisation Management System in England demonstrates significant levels of increased protection against hospitalization or death from COVID with mRNA booster vaccines following a primary two-dose course of either ChAdOx1-S or BNT162b2 vaccines.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 831-837 |
| Number of pages | 7 |
| Journal | Nature Medicine |
| Volume | 28 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| Early online date | 14 Jan 2022 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Apr 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information: The authors declare no competing interests.Open Access: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Publisher Copyright: © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature America, Inc.
Citation: Andrews, N., Stowe, J., Kirsebom, F. et al. Effectiveness of COVID-19 booster vaccines against COVID-19-related symptoms, hospitalization and death in England. Nat Med 28, 831–837 (2022).
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-022-01699-1
